My music is best understood by children and animals.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.